Recently it’s become vogue for Portland’s trendier drinking
establishments to offer a selection of fine old books to peruse while
one sips. Among the tomes at Expatriate: Fitzgerald, Steinbeck, Kingsley
Amis and a 1922 edition of National Geographic featuring an article called “A Caravan Journey Through Abyssinia.”

The stacks provide a nice welcome to Expatriate, the bar
Beast chef Naomi Pomeroy and her husband, shaker-mover Kyle Linden
Webster, opened across the street from that prix-fixe dinner house last
summer. It’s a self-consciously worldly affair, the sort of place you
expect people to swap stories about traveling by camel as they munch on
Burmese tea leafs.

True, you could drop $100 on drinks and snacks. But the
cocktails are some of the finest in town. The six I’ve sipped were all
stiff and balanced, especially the No. 8, a tonic of Pierre Ferrand
1840, Dickel rye, génépi, Italian vermouth and Regan’s orange bitters.
Also enjoyable is a cocktail called the Dorleac, which is quite a bit
sweeter, though not out of balance, with vodka, Aperol, lemon, honey,
elderflower and Angostura bitters. In an era when so many Portland bars
endeavor to make their own bitters with mixed success, Webster says he
remains a defender of the classics, and makes his case well.

The food menu is diverse and playful, with everything from
corn dogs (crumbled Chinese sausage encased in supple breading) to a
Burmese coconut noodle bowl built from wheat noodles, coconut sauce,
cilantro roast chicken, duck confit and a gooey half-egg. Best of all is
a Brussels sprouts plate that finds Napa cabbage, Szechuan pepper
vinaigrette, and caramelized squash with a little smoky ground lamb.

Among the city’s new wave of
reservation-recommended watering holes, Pepe Le Moko and Multnomah
Whiskey Library might be fun for an hour, but Expatriate left a
lingering impression. Walk through the green canvas tent that separates
this little world from the big world around it, and you feel privileged
to live such a smart and fashionable life. MARTIN CIZMAR.

3. The Eagle Eye

5836 SE 92nd Ave., 774-2141. 2 pm-2 am daily.

Way out in Lents, at the corner of Southeast Foster Road
and 92nd Avenue, sat a crappy old bar named Riley’s where gray men fed
their SSI checks back to the state through video-poker machines. When
the bar lost its lottery license, the owner, long past retirement age,
was about to lose his business.

THE EAGLE EYE

IMAGE: Jerek Hollender

Enter Erin Wagner. Wagner has some experience turning
stabberific alky dives into neighborhood treasures, having taken over
Becken’s Winning Hand Tavern after the bar’s namesake publican was
busted for selling meth on the premises. In its place, Wagner opened
82nd Avenue’s best bar, the Lion’s Eye, furnishing it from Craigslist
and working 80 hours a week until she’d won over the regulars and driven
off the riffraff.

“If someone is an ass to people,” she says, “I don’t care
how much money they spend. I’ll ask them to go somewhere else. That
really creates a nice atmosphere.”

Wagner, who’s worked in the bar business off and on since
she was 21, and booked dancers and tended bar at a now-closed strip club
before inheriting $25,000 from her grandfather, put her formula into
action at the newly christened Eagle Eye, in part by removing the
video-poker machines.

The Eagle Eye is still growing out of the rec-room
stage—it’s spacious with big windows and a drop ceiling that’s been
painted to look like tin paneling—but there’s a smooth pool table and
tap lines so clean that former patrons could get dialysis through them.
Beer and liquor are local, Friday and Saturday nights have karaoke, and
Monday nights feature Critical Comedy, an open-mic session where
comedians critique each other’s bits, an idea that’s now being exported
to Seattle and Los Angeles. It’s all part of giving the place its own
atmosphere—a spirit Wagner is spreading.

“If I hired the best of the best bartenders at a new place
out in far Southeast, I’m sure they’d still be looking for something
else,” she says. “I like to invest in them with how I like things to be
done. They might not know how to make a perfect martini, but they should
be really friendly with it and learn.” MARTIN CIZMAR.

Alan Taylor wants us to smell everything in his basement.
He pulls little green nubs out of bags in the basement of Pints Brewing—
fresh Bavarian hops. Taylor learned brewing in Bavaria, and since
taking over as brewmaster at the tiny brewery, he’s been making some of
the most accomplished beers in town, hybrids of Northwest and German
brewing techniques: Hopfenstopfer dry hops, a Rauchweizen rich with
Bavarian yeast. Patrons can sample the brews in epic shot-glass taster
flights.

But aside from the sterling beer, Pints is maybe the last
friendly pub in Old Town. Situated between the the Entertainment
District clubs and the chichi lounges of the Pearl, the brewpub is a
deeply comfortable hardwood and brick-wall mecca. Fries come free with
your first beer at happy hour. A party room in the back, near the
fermenters, offers oddly touching intimacy with the beer. But Pints has
remained off the radar, even from the beer hordes who mob Bailey’s
Taproom across Burnside.

Portland is full of beer bars that huddle you under
uncomfortable fluorescent light or funnel you through crowds like a
Temple Grandin test subject, and Old Town is full of spots that seem
hostile to human life. But Pints has accomplished something seemingly
impossible: an Old Town beer bar you might happily visit even if the
beer were awful. But the beer is not awful. It’s terrific. And with
brewing outposts pending in Lents and in Albuquerque, it’s also the
pint-sized germ of a beer empire. MATTHEW KORFHAGE.

5. Liberty Glass

938 N Cook St., 517-9931. 5 pm-2:30 am Monday-Sunday.

You mention Liberty Glass to Portlanders, and they get a
faraway look in their eyes. “Is that,” they ask, “the old pink-painted
house near the tire swing? I haven’t been there in ages...” Even though
brother and sister Rose and Jason McCormick started Liberty Glass only
in 2008, you’d think everybody was talking about their childhoods.

Liberty Glass is the bar equivalent of a deep cut on an
old soul album. It doesn’t play as often on the decks, but its roots
grow in memory. And it is well worth remembering, which is why we’re
naming it one of our favorite Portland bars of this year–or any other,
really.

Besides, it’s maybe the first modern bar in Portland to
really commit to deer antlers, which means they’re still acting as the
interior decorator for every ironically post-rustic bar that’s opened in
the meantime. Except Liberty Glass is sincere in its hospitality. The
bar is an ode to porch-front living, offering an early-spring Stone
smoked porter by the fireplace in the front yard. There’s a gazebo over
the wheelchair ramp. And if it feels like you’re a welcome guest in
someone’s home, it’s because you are: The upstairs bathroom of the old
house sports a bathtub, which gets used. There’s a locked room that
belongs to one of the owners’ kids, which the bartender raided for books
recently when a friend brought his young daughter for a recent Sunday
spaghetti feed ($7). The gesture was kind, and the spaghetti was
delicious. MATTHEW KORFHAGE.